I think it's all about the level of the thing..
Drake, your artifacts are sound to be very powerful , so if you start with all of them it will be a game breaker,
the minotaur thing is not that powerful, I could actually start as a minotaur endemic to the fantasy world, I just wanted my character to be interested to return home to the human world and also to have some cool thing, so I chose to be a human that turned into a minotaur, if you look closely I actually miss on a lot of things by making this choice,
for example I don't have any magic abilities at all..